Inq: Unused space on hard drives recovered

[Davegod]

Linq

READER WILEY SILER has sent us a method which he said was discovered by Scott Komblue and documented by himself which they claim can recover unused areas of the hard drive in the form of hidden partitions...

WTH?

Under the "Interesting results to date", most of them seem fathomable, perhaps for example the Harddisk manufacturers take larger drives and disable a platter or something to make it into a smaller drive (e.g. for scale of production reasons, while keeping a range of different drive sizes [and prices]).

but:
Western Digital 200GB SATA
Yield after recovery: 510GB of space

That seems rather unlikely to me.

 

[Markfw]

I agree. A low level can recover some space, IF it is really good, but I can;t believe that one, since the platters only hold about 200 gig by design.

 

[Pariah]

Some HD's are short stroked, but there are none with "dormant" platters. That would be a complete waste of money in a field that is already scratching for every penny of profit per drive. This article must be a joke. The only "hidden" partition on the drive that could possibly be recovered is the space reserved for storing bad sector and platter defect information, which would be very bad to write over. The size gains are a joke too,all of them. 510GB? Right....

 

[Davegod]

If there's any truth behind it (and the Inq indicate they arent saying there is), I wonder if they actually tried putting that amount of data onto the drives? Maybe it just screws up the drive information or whatever, so bios/windows reads the drive as that large when actually there is no real storage increase.

 

[Mark R]

I'd love to see what happens if you try and fill all 510 GB. My guess is that that your first 300 GB or so mysteriously vanish.

 

[Bregor]

This reminds me of people who would put everything on their HD into zip files to save space- and then zip up the zip files repeatedly, expecting to save more and more space.